[Bangkok, Thailand] At first, it was terrible. A braying discordant noise outside the guesthouse bedroom window. Unrelenting. The first night I was too exhausted to figure it out. This was a hostel-feeling ‘guesthouse,’ with hallways with no barrier to the outdoors and basic bedrooms. The street blocks it sat on were the prettiest I saw in Bangkok, lined with thick lush green foliage with tribalesque/tiki statues peaking out randomly. The bars/restaurants touted a hipster look rivaling anything I see in Portland (e.g., plants, kitschy mismatched furniture, macrame type hangings), open-sided with lines of chairs and couches facing the road to watch the street traffic and incredible rain downpours. I descended into an existential debate, maybe in part because Thailand was the epitomy of my adolescent travel goals: did hipster culture start here? Or had here been invaded by Western hipster culture? The travel books tell tall tales of how backpacker culture practically started here—specifically in this neighborhood (Khao San Road was just blocks away). Maybe backpackers picked up lush eccentricity in Thailand and then disseminated it to cities across the Americas and Europe. Just delusions of a tired first night. By midday next day, it was clear that the rest of Bangkok was nothing like this little corner. So this touristy corner of Bangkok has groomed itself to cater to tourists like myself sigh. Hipster culture has globalized. An old dilemma Rockboy and I would moan about: hipsters: insufferable but you sure miss them when you’re somewhere they don’t care to infiltrate. To get back to the point, I was tired and in no mood for sleep prohibitors. Despite being in the middle of an urban jungle, there was a constant cacophony of forest-jungle sounds: bird twirls, odd clicks - White Lotus doesn’t lie. But it was after the torrential rain that the frog symphony really came to life. After a couple days, their songs stopped being disconcerting and unpleasant. In my exhaustion and insomnia, I learned that if you can be one with the frogs and notice their coordination, somewhere between the pulses of nature and human song, they are deeply comforting. As loud as it was, it must have been tens and tens of frogs and somehow their voices rose and fell in concert – with one frog sometimes doing a discordant little solo. I got to where I missed their music when they went on break. I checked to see if others have realized this magic. Yes, they have – the hippies have. One blog joked that every hippie household in the 70s had a ‘song of the whales’ album. Smithsonian Folkways released a song of the frogs album.
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